Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Monday, January 14, 2008

THE SECOND PLANE Amis's war on terror by other means

In The Second Plane, Martin Amis defends the authority of writers about Islamist terrorism, but offers plenty of ammunition for his detractors, says Tim Adams 2008 writing in The Observer yesterday.

The Second Plane by Martin Amis Jonathan Cape £12.99

Last month, speaking to Terry Eagleton about his 'feud' with Martin Amis over the proper response of the liberal left to Islamist terrorism, I asked the professor whether he considered Amis a worthy debating opponent. He replied: 'I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners.'Among its many ambitions this book wants to put him right. As well as being a collection of the dozen or so pieces - essays, short stories, reportage - Amis has written in response to the events of 11 September and to the War on Terror, it is an argument for why a novelist's voice should be privileged on these subjects. In his introduction to the collection, Amis makes part of his case: 'If September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime ... Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medics' smocks of the Islamic radical?' Cometh the hour, cometh the Mart.

Amis has a need to lay claim to big subjects in this manner - in the past he has soughtto make the holocaust and the gulags part of his 'natural' territory ofwarped masculinity too; in each case, in Time's Arrow and Koba the Dread, herisked reimagining the extremes of historical horror with his full ironist'sswagger. Few writers have put comparable effort into offering neologisms fortorture techniques; Amis did so in the belief that language must be fullyalive for us to comprehend the banality of industrialised death.

In this sense suicidal al-Qaeda, alongside its other more visceral threats to our lives, presenteda literary challenge. In the second of the essays here, 'The Voice of theLonely Crowd', Amis argues that one of the first casualties of 'The LongWar' after 11 September was the western literary imagination in general, andhis own in particular. 'After a couple of hours at their desks, on September12,' Amis wrote, 'all writers on earth were considering the course thatLenin urged on Maxim Gorky: a change of occupation.' They had beenoutflanked. As Don DeLillo pointed out, in another context, 'there is a deepnarrative structure to terrorist acts and they infiltrate and alterconsciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to'.

Amis's instinct was to attempt to reclaim some of that power. In his case the writer's block lasted a short week (several other novelists got over it even sooner). He then sethimself the task of finding a language that could describe the 'worldflashof a coming future', the 'horrorism', the 'self-besplatterment' of Islamicterrorism. In his view, this rhetorical ownership was not only a necessaryeffort, but also a moral one.

One of the arguments that runs through this book is that barbarism is all but indistinguishable from religion and that the opposite of religious belief is not atheism, butindependence of mind. The highest expression of independent minds in westernenlightened culture is, to Amis, its literary fiction ('reason at play').His personal struggle against the 'dependent mind' of Islam is thus foughton the level of playful language.